About a year ago, I wrote about how iTunes’ Genius feature wasn’t offering suggestions for much of my music. There was obviously something out of kilter with Apple’s servers, because, a couple of weeks later, it started working again.
I’ve been seeing some problems with Genius again lately, though not quite the same. I often use Genius Shuffle to listen to music. To use this feature, press Option-Space (Alt-Space on Windows), and iTunes will pick a track at random, and create a Genius playlist from it. In the past few days, I’ve seen this dialog when I try to start Genius Shuffle:
I tried turning of Genius, and then turning it on again, forcing iTunes to recreate my Genius database, but I’m still seeing the same thing. I’m getting Genius suggestions for a lot of my music, but for some reason, iTunes won’t start Genius Shuffle. iTunes displays Genius suggestions for much of my non-classical music, but for most of my classical collection, it’s mute. And when it does offer Genius suggestions for classical music, they’re pretty far off the mark.
To not suggest other songs by Schubert for the above track – I have a few thousand of them – is surprising. And even some purchased tracks, in various genres, aren’t showing Genius suggestions.
Genius Shuffle used to work all the time, and would often dish up classical music. Now it seems to be ignoring about 90% of my classical collection.
What about other classical music fans? Are you seeing the same thing?
Update, February 20: It was clearly an issue on Apple’s end. I now can start the Genius Shuffle, and get Genius suggestions on a lot more music than when I wrote this post.